


How Barton Won a $100 Bet before New Years

by Odamaki



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Bets & Wagers, Christmas Crack, Crack, Heero is bad at feelings, Jealousy, M/M, Probably ooc, Trowa is tired of their nonsense, UST, Wufei is a disaster, just embarrassing really, oblivious idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 04:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17297747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odamaki/pseuds/Odamaki
Summary: Crackfic 1x5. Honestly defies description.“Every year, Wufei gets drunk at every party he’s forced to attend and hits on you, and every time you say no, and it is excruciatingly embarrassing for everyone forced to witness it.” Trowa crosses one foot over the other and, seeing that he has captured the full laser-beam of Heero’s attention, continues. “We never exchange gifts but, how about as my gift to you and every other Preventer keen to survive the celebrations, I give Wufei something new to think about.”





	How Barton Won a $100 Bet before New Years

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a post on Tumblr by incorrectgundamwingquotes and then my hand slipped.

“If you wouldn’t fuck a dragon then you’re WRONG.” 

Heero glowers at his phone and replies, “Stop texting me this every time you’re drunk and someone turns you down.” 

“‘Someone’?” Trowa comments, reading over his shoulder. Heero moves the phone aside, scowling harder. 

“Stop that.” 

Trowa shakes his head and tuts, refilling both their drinks from the bottle on his coffee table. If Wufei is still texting, he can only assume that the Preventer Christmas Party is still raging along as wildly they’d left it, and it hasn’t reached the part where the sober agents on duty have had to shut it down. Using his height, he steals another look at Heero’s phone, and the message is still there on screen. 

“It’s not ‘someone’. It’s ‘I’,” Trowa corrects. 

Heero snorts. “Is it? You’re welcome to him.” 

Trowa raises both eyebrows, and murmurs, “Harsh,” into his glass. Heero sinks into a deep brooding silence and maybe it’s the jollity of the season or the booze, but Trowa can’t help goading him. 

“What if I did?” 

“What?” Heero says, turning on him at once. 

“What if I did,” Trowa repeats, rolling the ice in his glass. He gives a theatrical shrug. “Every year, Wufei gets drunk at every party he’s forced to attend and hits on you, and every time you say no, and it is excruciatingly embarrassing for everyone forced to witness it.” Trowa crosses one foot over the other and, seeing that he has captured the full laser-beam of Heero’s attention, continues. “We never exchange gifts but, how about as my gift to you and every other Preventer keen to survive the celebrations, I give Wufei something new to think about.” 

Heero stares at him. “You don’t like Wufei like that.” 

“Well, I haven’t tried yet,” Trowa admits. “But short boys are my type.” 

In his Reserved-brand of Speaking To Idiots voice, Heero says, “Everyone’s short compared to you.” 

Trowa just gives another little shrug to say, ‘there you are then’. Heero looks at him with deeper suspicion. Then he slouches back into the couch in a mood and slugs at his drink. Trowa waits. He is excellent at waiting, exuding an increasingly pressing kind of silence. Heero, well used to it, holds off for a long time before snapping. 

“They do it on purpose.” 

“Who do?” 

“My team. His team. They make a conspiracy of getting Wufei drunk because they think it’s funny.” 

“He’s a very sloppy drunk.”

“He is such a sloppy drunk,” Heero agrees with regret. It’s an incontrovertible fact. Wufei is a horrendous drunk. He can’t handle it and it brings out his worst, and his usually most hidden, qualities in such an elasticated, exaggerated way that he ends up by the end of the night as nine-tenths a cartoon villain, lacking only the moustache and the cape. With an enormous crush on one Heero Yuy.

And then he usually has to be parked with his head in a toilet until he gets over it. 

Or perhaps the days after are worse, when Wufei returns to work with the geniality of an icicle armed with spring-loaded hulk fists on a hair trigger. Staff have learned, with the exception of the very dim and the very new, that reprising Wufei of his antics is an act that leads to… well, not certain death, but certainly a working environment that would leave you wishing for the sweet release of the void. 

Not to mention the three weeks of avoiding Heero until they’re both set to pretend nothing has happened. 

Trowa muses, “So you’re saying I should really get in there before he’s drunk? Early on.” 

“I didn’t say anything,” Heero replies, with a little heat. 

“But that’s evidently the way around it. Maybe I could tempt him away from attending the party altogether.”

“Ditch it?” 

“Why not? We always do. Very much the schedule year after year; dinner, drinks, wait for Wufei to embarrass you, bail out to my house and drink sad bastard whisky in front of crap films til morning, while you obsessively text Wufei about how you’re not speaking to him.”

Heero, usually a quiet man, is for once genuinely speechless. And offended. Trowa deftly palms his offence and lobs it lightly back at him. 

“I’m just saying, break the cycle. I’m offering, in fact, to do the good deed myself.” 

“You’re an ass,” Heero retorts, at a volume that is very nearly shouting. 

“Maybe so,” Trowa admits, “But the more I think about it, the more it seems like fun.” 

“Fun? Trowa, you’re not into Wufei.” 

“I haven’t shot him down in public four times, no, and I’m probably not going to marry him, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t lob the ball into Wufei’s court. If he says yes, what’s the problem? I’d like to think sex with me is a good alternative to humiliation. Actually, I might not wait for a party. Five bucks I’ve done the deed by New Years.” 

There is a curt pause and then Heero hunkers into what can only be described as a position of vulturine menace, bangs his glass down on the table and reaches for his jacket. Childishly, he stomps through Trowa’s legs on his way out, spilling them off the table, and then the door bangs. In the ensuing interval, Trowa gently wiggles one finger in his ear to ease the ringing and raises a toast to the ceiling. 

“Thank God for that,” he says, and pours himself a stiff two fingers worth of Merry Christmas To Me.  
___

Outrage carries Heero a full four blocks away from Trowa’s apartment and four blocks closer to the Preventer Christmas Party before his thoughts begin to reform any kind of order. That and he crosses a road blindly with all the impetus of a tank compressed into five foot six of angry human, and the screech of brakes and blare of horns reminds him that he’s not alone on the streets. 

The smart bit of Heero knows that Trowa is fucking with him. Its voice, however, is muffled by a sponge of hard liquor, and is not likely to get any louder. He’s hit that stage of drunkenness where reasonably one should stop drinking but is unable to realise this fact because the alcohol already imbibed is still busy percolating, smothering good sense, and cheerily saying ‘Let’s have one more, I’m not even drunk yet!’. 

So the only message that manages to get through is that Trowa Barton is a predatory bastard of the first order and must be stopped; and it comes barrelling out of his hind brain emblazoned on a bowling bowl of other muddled emotions, which knock down the rest of Heero’s logical thoughts like skittles. 

Good. Scrap wood. Make club. Hit Barton, and possibly Wufei for good measure.

As luck would have it, Heero still has his invitation and the paper security wristband on his person, which makes strong-arming his way back into the party much more civilised than it would be otherwise. His reappearance also causes a little stir, possibly because the underlings rely on him leaving and not coming back in order to have some real fun without said fun coming up in their annual reviews. Heero collars the first one he sees. 

“Where’s Chang?” 

“Outside? Getting air?” The underling pedals slightly in mid-air, with the disconcerted expression of a grown man who hasn’t been picked up off the floor since he was a child, and certainly not by any adult shorter than him. 

Heero drops him. “Where?” 

The huddle of wide-eyed lackeys point in unison like an anemone towards the courtyard and Heero stalks off, leaving a long ‘oooh’ of rumour to rise in his wake. 

The courtyard is all shadows and blinky little lights, and people doing furtive things in the former; smoking, and sticking things in orifices, mainly. Heero does half a lap of the bacchanalia and then stumbles across Wufei almost by accident, alone on one of the benches. He’s leaning despondently on his own knee, listing sideways over the arm of the bench into a rose bush. His other hand pressed to his forehead, a cigarette shaking between his fingers. Even as Heero registers it’s him, Wufei presses the cigarette to his lips and it dribbles ash onto his trousers. 

He exhales the smoke into the bush, coughs, and heaves a pained sigh. It is the sigh of a man who has sobered just enough to realise the absolute mattress of alcohol he’s stuck under, and start regretting it. 

Heero kicks him in the shins anyway. It’s like kicking a wet bag of cement. 

“Ow,” says Wufei, after a pause. 

“You’re a mess,” Heero accuses. Wufei blinks at him, blinks at the cigarette and looses what little colour is left in his face. So he recognises him. Wufei doesn’t say anything though. Clearly he recalls having said plenty earlier in the evening, and has resolved to keep his mouth shut. 

Or possibly he’s just trying not to be sick. 

As punishment, Heero steals his cigarette and grinds it to a smear with the heel of his shoe. “You don’t smoke.” This is true. 

“Mm,” Wufei says, still without revealing if he’s holding back words or just vomit. 

There then passes something of a stalemate, because Heero hadn’t planned what to do once he found Wufei. In fairness, he’d barely planned to find Wufei at all. He hasn’t got his gun so he can’t shoot him, and shaking him until his teeth rattle seems well… a bit juvenile for a Preventer agent of his class. 

He settles for hooking Wufei by his shirt collar and dredging him upwards from the bench. “Get up.” 

Wufei at least is the kind of drunk who can keep his balance when he wants to. Heero’s even seen him walk a straight line even while sailing seven sheets to the wind. It’s nice and easy to commandeer him away from the bench and start frogmarching him towards the exit. 

“Oh shit,” someone says, louder than they mean to. “Agent Yuy’s got Chang.” 

The peanut gallery goggle at him as Heero blazes a glare in the direction of the speaker. Then, lest they get any ideas, he says, with much emphasis. “I’m going to murder him.” And then doesn’t wait for any kind of chorus. 

Let them try and make a romance out of that.  
___

By the time they’ve walked two blocks away from the Preventers Christmas Party and two blocks towards Heero’s apartment, Wufei has managed to compose himself enough to walk unaided, trailing after Heero like a kicked dog, and the edge of Heero’s temper has started to blunt. 

He’s also starting to feel a touch hypocritical. It’s not like he hasn’t committed his own share of emotional confusions, complete with outlandish stunts. And he was sober for most of them. 

And it’s not romantic. 

It’s not romantic when they pass by all the Christmas lights, and it’s not romantic when they stop for coffee, because it’s not. It’s about not being a mess, and as far as Heero is concerned, that involves bullying some strong, black coffee down Wufei. It makes him more bloodshot around the eyes and shakes about the fingers, but does seem to sober him up a bit. 

It’s not romantic when they get to the door of Heero’s apartment and Wufei says, ‘I’ll call a taxi’ and Heero says, ‘Shut up. You live clear across town and you’re wasted’. And it’s not romantic when they’re inside either, when Heero says, ‘You might as well take the bed,’ and Wufei growls back, crawling out of his suit, ‘Fuck off, Yuy. I’m sleeping on the sofa’. And he does. 

And snores rigorously for the rest of the night.  
____ 

In the morning, Heero rouses in time to catch Wufei about to steal out of his apartment. Wufei freezes, halfway to the door. He has recovered most of his faculties and also most of his suit, but evidently not all of them. 

“Leaving?” Heero says. Hitching up his few remaining scraps of dignity to cover himself, Wufei nods, turns and reaches for the front door. 

“Your shoes are under the couch,” Heero tells him. “If you want them.” 

Painfully, Wufei turns back and goes barefoot back to fetch them, slinking past Heero with as much distance between them as can be created in a narrow hall. Heero unhelpfully stands there, making an obstruction of himself, and without quite planning to, traps Wufei back in the living room with his shoes. 

It takes a minute or two for Wufei to get them on, neither the hangover nor Heero’s stare helping his fine motor skills along. Finally he stands and Heero still doesn’t move. 

“Are you going to let me go?” Wufei says, not meeting his eye and gesturing to the door. 

“You’re an idiot. Why do you always do this to us?” 

Wufei flushes and then pales, and does a lot of hard swallowing. 

“Are you going to vomit?” 

“No!” Wufei says, hastily, and with a jolt, Heero recognises Wufei’s got the very same bowling-ball emotions stuck in him, and doesn’t know how to pick them apart either, because he’s the one man on the planet actually worse at feelings than Heero is. Puzzled, Heero eyes up the gordian knot Wufei is presenting, and takes a good whack at it with the best tools he has available. 

“You like me.” 

There’s a little mental push-pull as they both test how far through the knot Heero’s manage to cleave, and then Wufei shrugs and then says, “I keep trying not to.” 

This nettles Heero enough to unfold his arms and show surprise as well as annoyance. “Why? What’s wrong with me?” 

“It just doesn’t work,” Wufei says, like he’s said it a lot before, and like it’s true. “And you piss me off. So. Much. You go over every single thing I do, constantly, mixed-signals, but it’s never… There’s no winning with you. Ever.” He pauses, and then adds, bitterly, “You’re always Agent Yuy.”

“I am Agent Yuy,” Heero says, before he thinks about it properly. And then he thinks about it properly, and it’s true, and it’s complicated. “Why didn’t you say anything?” 

“I’m going home,” Wufei says, who has had enough. “You can answer that one by yourself.”

A panic rises in Heero because there’s something he was supposed to do, and must do, and hasn’t yet. And Wufei can’t leave until he’s done it. Hastily, he steps into Wufei’s path again, buffeting him back towards the living room. 

“What? Now what do you want?” Wufei says, spluttering. 

“Don’t let Trowa seduce you.” 

Wufei recoils another step, and then squints at him. “I… what?” 

“I just remembered. He said you were his type. Don’t let him seduce you. Break his fingers first. Or I will.” 

Wufei stares at him, eyes narrowing, and then lighting up in triumph. “You’d be jealous?” 

“It’s just a bad idea,” Heero returns, defensively. “He’s a bastard.” 

“You’d be jealous. Hah! You’d be jealous! I knew it!”

“I would actually kill him.” 

Wufei prods him hard in the chest. “Tell me you like me, you stupid little man.” 

“No, I kind of want to kill you as well,” Heero objects, cornered, flushed, with a weird urge to grapple Wufei into the floor, only Wufei’s too close and personal, and his arms won’t move.

“Admit that you want me too.” 

“I don’t want to admit it,” Heero blurts. 

“Hah!” Wufei rears back, quixotic, exultant, finger brandished at Heero like a dao. “There! You said it!” He laughs, sounding drunk again, and disgustingly smug. “Next party,” he threatens, “You’d better unbutton something and kiss me, because now I know, I’m not ever going to stop trying.” 

Heero scrabbles over speechlessness to say, “No.”

“Well, if you don’t like me, I’ll fuck Barton then.” 

“No you won’t,” Heero says, alarmed. 

“I will. If he wants a dragon, then a dragon he shall get.”

“Stop calling yourself that, it’s embarrassing.” 

“And you still want me!” Wufei crows, because it’s true. 

“You’re a disgrace,” Heero retorts, pushing him away towards the door. “You have ash on your knees. No, literally; I’m not being metaphorical. Go home.” 

“You can’t ignore me, I work with you!” 

“I can,” Heero growls, and shuts the door on him quickly, because it’s too obvious a lie.  
____

He can’t ignore Wufei. Wufei makes himself so impossible to ignore. This was true before the Christmas party, and it’s just as true afterwards. Heero tries to bear in mind Wufei’s comment and NOT keep checking to see what Wufei and his team are doing, but it’s a habit of years now, and he can’t break it overnight. Besides, it’s interesting. It’s always been interesting, watching Wufei work. Admittedly, it’s interesting in the way a three car pileup is interesting, but if anything, that adds a certain spice to it. 

Wufei is somehow both a stickler for the rules, and a in terms of following Preventer’s policy, a disaster. Not as bad as Team Maxwell, who reads policy as ‘suggestions from people who don’t know cheese from crackers’. But Duo’s usual line of defence is a genuinely baffled ‘What’s that?’ when confronted with the laws he has broken, whereas Wufei knows them all verbatim, agrees with them, and still demotes them lower than his cardinal law, which is ‘I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up.’ 

At any rate, he gets the job done.

They never meet outside of work. Duo will get it into his head once a month to haul Heero to a bar and tip a drink down his throat, and Trowa makes rotations of other people’s houses at whim, like a stray cat. And roughly twice a week, Heero gets home to find Trowa parked on his sofa, eating a sandwich and doing paperwork. 

Heero would complain, but Trowa is often the only reason food gets from the supermarket to his fridge. 

But Trowa hasn’t turned up since the night of the Christmas Party, and that was in the middle of December. Christmas has come and gone, and although ostensibly things in the office are business as usual, Heero gets the uncanny sense of a change in the weather. Not literally. It’s still a bitter winter, but now the frost comes with an air of suspicion about it. Heero watches closer than ever, but Wufei at least is unperturbed. 

In fact, Wufei has made no outward signs at all of acknowledging the Christmas Party and its aftermath, to the extent that Heero has recently begun to wonder if he remembers any of it at all. It’s not impossible that Wufei woke up still very drunk, just better able to hide it. Or that he’s repressed it all, in one of his Space Warrior Monk fits of self-flagellation and second guessing himself. Then again, they are still in the traditional Three Weeks of Denial. 

And it’s New Years soon. This usually comprises any one of a dozen informal drinking parties, rather than a full department do as per Christmas, but it’s nevertheless ‘the next party’. 

So when Trowa strolls into the office about halfway through the month on the morning of the event, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, Heero instantly leaps to red alert. He ignores Heero, which is rude to begin with, and then makes himself a coffee without offering one to anyone else. Bastard. Heero glares over the top of his computer down at the coffee machine, with his own empty cup perched at his elbow. Trowa leisurely uses no less than four creamers and leaves the cartons lying in little puddles on the bench. 

A sure sign of evil. 

He’s doing it on purpose, Heero is absolutely certain. Trowa strolls over to discuss something with another team, and smiles, and laughs, and they smile and laugh back, albeit with the laughs and smiles of people who are a little uncertain what the joke is. He stands for a while, checking his phone, while Heero’s emails build up and his mouse stops working because the plastic on it has cracked. 

Cheap piece of crap. 

He’s distracted for a moment in sweeping the crushed remains into the bin and purloining a new one from the nearest underling, and when he looks up again, Trowa is stood over Wufei’s desk, leaning over it, saying something in Wufei’s face. And Wufei has a very funny expression indeed, and Heero’s holding a second broken mouse because there is no way in this life he is going to owe Trowa five bucks on a horrible bet that involves stealing his boyfriend. 

When he thinks about it later, Heero only has very misty recollections of crossing the office. There had been some sort of brief resistance which may or may not have been a desk, but it had been very insubstantial in either case. He does not recall punching Trowa, though he is told many times how Trowa’s head had snapped back and the man had gone sprawling dramatically in a fountain of paper from Wufei’s inbox. He recalls swinging, but not hitting, and he thinks he would have recalled that if he’d connected, because it would have been so satisfying, but supposes he’ll settle for the reputation in lieu of the fact.

Mostly, he recalls breathing very hard and Wufei looking nowhere near as surprised as Heero would have expected, and then mysteriously pushing his whole wallet off of his desk onto Trowa’s stomach before kissing him hard. And the kiss, which still manages to stand out from the others they’ve had, probably because it had come with a chorus of whoops from the underlings. 

And Wufei laughing hard and prodding his collar where Heero had popped a button inadvertently, and kissing him again, which turns out to be an excellent cure for unresolved jealous sexual tension. Albeit having had it in the office did result in an official reprimand and an awful lot of paperwork. On the other hand, there was something nice about having a sort-of first date doing it on the sofa together, and then, together, doing it on the sofa. 

“I was right,” Wufei says, wholly self-satisfied. 

“I’m never calling you ‘the dragon’.”

“You were wrong.” 

“Shut up,” Heero says for him, and makes a mental note to thank Trowa somehow, who is now banned from wandering into Heero’s apartment whenever he likes. Not as punishment, but because Trowa says he doesn’t want to see Heero’s bare ass. This is both true and fair. Presumably then, Trowa’s doing all his paperwork at home these days. 

Surfacing for air briefly, Heero cocks his head at Wufei and asks, with a sudden idea, “How many short boys do we know?”


End file.
